Betting a million dollars v. death
When I was a teenager, I used to go through these weird betting motions in my head. When I figured I knew something very assuredly, I made a kind of bet in my own mind: would I take a mortal bet of $1,000,000? I was weighing the odds of whether I was sure enough about something to wager my life on it; the upside is the million dollars, of course. I did this inside my head from time to time over the course of a year, weighing the certainty of some situations from my everyday life. The “wagers” were all relatively simple things that I could look up immediately; for instance, if I could remember what a particular acronym (such as HTML) stood for, or the value of the gravitational constant to the first three significant figures, or even a particular person’s last name. The thought of these “wagers” would crop up repeatedly, and I took them really seriously.
Of course I wasn’t really going to win a million dollars for knowing something correctly, and thankfully, neither was I going to die for knowing something incorrectly. I learned an important lesson after making and “winning” ten such bets: I lost. I don’t remember what exactly the wager was over, but I was dead sure of it, and willing to theoretically put my life on the line. But I looked up the answer online and was in shock. Had these wagers been real, I would have been dead at the age of fifteen, rich to the tune of $10,000,000 accumulated across the previous bets, but still dead.
I learned an important lesson about uncertainty that day, purely from an ongoing gedankenexperiment. Just by playing out silly, unrealistic scenarios in my head, I surprised myself and came to the simple conclusion that life isn’t worth betting away, no matter how good you think the odds are. The problem with trying to calculate odds is that one needs complete information — something we have when we’re evaluating, say, the odds of the sum of two tossed dice coming up seven (six out of thirty-six), or the odds of winning a hand in Blackjack. But we don’t have complete information in trying to evaluate the kinds of situations that pop up in real life rather than in artificially constructed games of change, and the odds can be a lot different than we realize.
So I no longer gamble away my life, not theoretically inside my head, and certainly not in real life.
